Stop Inflicting Safety Culture and Start with Ourselves

From a Culture of Punishment to Partnership: Why Change Starts with the HSE Function

Safety culture is not just a set of regulations and instructions, but an atmosphere of trust and engagement at all levels of the company. In his presentation, Alexey Avramenko, a representative of Norilsk Nickel, analyzes a key problem: why traditional control methods stop working and how the HSE function must change to become a real partner for production.

Using his company as an example, the speaker shows that inflicting safety culture from the top down is ineffective. If the environment is built solely on punishments, workers develop the belief: "the main thing is not to get caught." This leads to the concealment of violations, distortion of facts, and, as a result, potentially dangerous incidents. To break this cycle, HSE specialists need to work with people's behavior and beliefs, and this requires building trust.

The Trust Formula: Expertise, Safety, and Closeness

The presentation details the mechanism of building trust between workers and HSE specialists. Trust is built on three key components:

• Expertise: An HSE specialist must have deep knowledge and production experience to speak the same language as the workers.
• Safety: The worker must feel that the HSE specialist does not pose a threat of immediate punishment for every mistake.
• Closeness: Communication should take place on an equal footing. The "I am the boss, you are the subordinate" attitude destroys trust and turns dialogue into a formality.

The speaker emphasizes that all these factors can be nullified by a specialist's high ego. The ability to listen, persuade, and influence without pressure are the soft skills that every HSE specialist needs to develop.

Measuring and Transforming the Image of the HSE Function

To understand how production perceives the HSE department, the company conducted an independent assessment of the HSE function's image using Patrick Hudson's ladder. The results showed a reactive level (2.63 points): workers perceived HSE specialists more as a source of problems and punishments than as helpers.

To change the situation, specific projects were launched:

• Soft skills development: Conducting training on partnership influence, difficult communications, and feedback for HSE specialists.
• Production internships: HSE specialists undergo workplace internships (from one shift to a month) to better understand the specifics and problems of production from the inside.
• "Safety Leadership" project: Managers regularly go down to the production floor, communicate with workers as equals, record problems, and publicly report on their resolution. This triggers a trust effect and engages teams in open dialogue.

Thanks to these initiatives, according to the results of a follow-up pulse survey, the image index rose to 2.90. Workers began to note the adequacy of decisions, the accessibility of specialists, and the real benefits of their work.

What you will learn from this webinar:

• How to measure the real image of the HSE department in the eyes of workers?
• Why traditional control methods lead to the concealment of violations and how to avoid this?
• What soft skills are critically important for a modern HSE specialist?
• How to organize HSE specialist internships in production and what benefits it brings?
• How to involve managers in the "Safety Leadership" project and build a dialogue with workers?